No, silly! Aliens built the pyramids.
Sheesh. Read a book.
Not to paint all Fundies with the same brush, but if the Rapture does come, and the Fundies ARE separated from the riff-raff, both groups will probably be happier.
No, aliens only engineered the pyramids. You don’t really think they’d get their [appendages] dirty with a whole planet of worker-bees at their disposal, do you?
I thought the aliens just used their powers of levitation to build the pyramids. Easy peasy.
And isn’t the assumption that EVERYONE knows what “The Rapture” is to also make the assumption that everyone is Christian? I mean, why should a Jew know about “The Rapture” since the Messiah hasn’t even come here once yet alone twice? It does seem ironic that The Chosen People would be left behind with all these free cars…
And I didn’t know what The Rapture was until someone sent me this article about a woman who jumped out of the sunroof of her car thinking that the Rapture was occuring when she saw other people floating up in the air. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s an urban legend but it cracks me up. But, if you didn’t know what The Rapture was, you wouldn’t get the joke.
Seriously? And thus my worst suspicions are confirmed yet again: not only do I attend a conservative Baptist church, it’s an extremely conservative Baptist church. For not only does the majority of the congregation believe in the Rapture, they have a nice map of all the supposed events to occur that materializes every so often.
jessica
Err…no?
I’m not a Christian, and I think the Rapture is hooey, but I know what it is. I mean most people know about Zeus and other big mythological things, I just figured the Rapture was one of those things.
Well, as they say on South Park, I learned something today:
Despite the fact that I went to a church that believed in the Rapture, I didn’t realize that the dead would be taken into heaven first.
So if you’re driving by a graveyard and you notice bodies coming out of the ground and floating up into the sky, don’t just sit there gawking! Pull off the road to avoid the imminent massive pile-up. Then start collecting those cars!
I wonder how many of the bodies will be sucked into jet engines…:eek:
I find RTFirefly’s quotes very interesting. Because a careful reading of the verses from Matthew would seem to me to be a * denial * of the concept of The Rapture. Specifically, the allusion to Noah seems to draw a parallel between The Flood and the coming of the Son of Man (Jesus). I read it as saying that, as with The Flood, those who are in God’s favor will be * the ones left behind *, not the ones “taken,” just as Noah and his family were the ones left after the waters devastated the sinful rest of humanity. Of course, the quote from Thessalonians does fairly directly state the generally understood concept of The Rapture, but I would consider Matthew, as one of the Synoptic Gospels, to be more authoritative (because it is supposedly directly about the life and teachings of Jesus) than any of the Pauline letters.
Makes sense, no?
I’m Catholic, at least in background, but I’m not religious so I don’t know much about Evangelical beliefs. I had no idea “rapture” was a religious term. I thought it meant theft or something.
There’s also thousands of those “Rapture” flyers stuck to light poles and signs, at least in the Greater Boston area. They are getting harder to find, especially since they predicted the Rapture at some point in the late 1990’s but I know of several still in place after all these years. Big red letters “RAPTURE”!
Maybe the Rapture already came and only took people that few people will notice missing, like street people and state senators?
Way back when, I wanted to start a denomination that would have claimed that the Rapture had come, but Jimmy Hoffa was the only one taken. 
OK, so what’s the difference between the Rapture and the traditional Day of Judgement or Resurrection???
In Stanley Spencer’s painting “Resurrection at Cookham” (somewhere here) everyone is resurrected - not just the self-righteous bores with Christian bumper stickers. Is the exclusivity of the Rapture a recent idea???
You know something? When I was little, I didn’t assume everyone was Christian-or Catholic, in my case. I did believe that if you weren’t, you were wrong (I mean, wrong as in mistaken, not wrong as in bad), but I always thought-well, when they die and go to Heaven, it’ll be okay then.
I also thought that death wasn’t permenant-that everyone would rise from the dead someday, and come back to live. It would be all right.
And I always thought the end of the world would be where everyone was alive, and happy and stuff.
But I never heard of the rapture until I was online, and the idea that if you weren’t such and such religion you wouldn’t be “saved” was pretty alien to me. I just thought it was that you were mistaken, but it was okay.
There was a lot of media attention about the Rapture in 1999…end of the millenium stuff…so some of us figured everyone had heard about it on the news back then. The sticky bit is this…you don’t get to enjoy the free stuff for long if you are left behind. If I remember correctly, and feel free to tell me if I don’t…once the chosen are taken up to heaven, the earth pretty much gets destroyed, and all the unbelievers die horrible deaths. That’s why they are taking the chosen away…to spare them the destruction of mankind.
According to this probably-mentally-diseased-but-not-humorless individual, the Rapture Index currently stands at 172. Anything above 145 apparently means the Rapture is very likely, so buy shares in bumper sticker producers now.
The components of the index seem to be based on the excrutiatingly tiresome Book of Apocalypse. (Though, I must say, he’s definitely onto something in viewing the EU as “Beast Government”.)
I’m amused. The Bible says we won’t know the day or the hour, but that never deters the hardcore types.
I don’t know about anyone else, but if God does this sort of thing for punishment, I want to hear what Satan has planned. I’m not a big fan of extortion, so this whole, “Behave or feel my wrath,” bit really cheeses me off.
Oh, and those rapture bumper stickers are the most arrogant things I’ve ever read. I would like to see the Rapture happen just so I can watch their faces when other people are taken away and they’re not.
Apparently you never had a mother. Or kids!
The word ‘rapture’ can’t even be found in the Bible. A ‘catching away’ is mentioned in Thessalonians, but according to the gospels, the tares (i.e. the wicked) will go first. I’m hangin’ on!